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Sonic Generator Explores the Artists’ Struggle
CONCERT REVIEW Sonic Generator. Thursday at Georgia Tech's Alumni House Ballroom. www.sonicgenerator.gatech.edu
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sonic Generator is Georgia Tech’s contemporary classical ensemble and it’s got a mission. Now in its second season, the group surveys the unstable edge of new music, where live musicians interact with technology. Like all good sci-fi, the results often strike a balance between the utopian and the dehumanizing.
In our Age of Information, the group should be in the thick of it, boasting its high-tech advantage. Thursday in Tech’s Alumni House, a full audience heard the eerie and sublime sounds of a cello singing a duet with a computer and a flute accompanying its genetic clone.
As iPhones and YouTube videos and the next generation of do-it-yourself gadgetry make a strong bid for cultural dominance, however, Sonic Generator’s concerts don’t seem as much avant-guarde as having a wistful, ironic air.
Touchingly, the concerts seem to long for the days when Americans believed unfettered science and engineering would solve our problems and improve the world. It’s a pre-“Silent Spring” mindset, perhaps, of better living through chemistry and atomic energy that would be too cheap to meter. Art could be improved, too, assuming that the greater the palette available to the artist, the greater the creativity possible.
Yet the evening’s most compelling works didn’t tap novel technologies but instead combined the arts and helped blur high and low, ancient and modern, the serious and the silly.
Nico Muhly’s “Pillaging Music” for piano and percussion (Lisa Leong and Tom Sherwood) opened the evening and set a playful and contemplative mood, where a funky mosaic of bright sounds gave way to the sensation of tiny waves rippling outward in a circular pond.
Randall Woolf’s “B.Y.O.D.” is a theater piece for video (created by Valerie Vasilevski and others) and six musicians, subtitled a “concert-infomercial” and “an intrusion of television culture into the concert hall.” A cheezy-scary narrator makes a pitch to cut out the middleman and “Bring your own dancer” — a political message about artists who struggle to make a living. It’s campy, funny and ultimately a little tragic. Woolf’s turbulent score supports the on-screen storyline without leaving its own impression.
Karen Tanka’s “The Song of Songs,” for solo cello (Brad Ritchie) and computer, built to an intense climax, slight but emotionally satisfying.
Less satisfying was Eric Moe’s “Let Me Tell U About R Specials,” a witty concept piece on the dehumanizing aspects of waitressing. In a program note, Moe invited us “to ponder the disturbing similarities between high art and the service economy.” (A running theme of the concert: how artists endure real-world hardships, like paying the rent.)
Before the music started, flutist Jessica Peek Sherwood admitted that she’d waited tables in a past life. A Barbie doll took the starring role in the video, which distracted from Sherwood’s virtuosity and the craggy interplay of her live flute and the pre-recorded “extreme technique” flute sounds.
Not everything worked. Henrik Strindberg’s “Cheap Thrills” required five players and a conductor — most of the evening’s musicians are affiliated with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra — and felt like a lot of hard work for a low payoff, for the players and listeners. Foggy and disorienting, it could be the soundtrack to an experimental film, where the protagonist is drugged and almost drowned. Weird synthetic gurgle sounds suggest waterboarding. Or maybe it’s a bad trip set to music.
Eric Chasalow’s “Suspicious Motives” sounded like a theme and variations set, the theme being amplified gastro-intestinal noises.
There was a world premiere in the mix . Nickitas Demos is a Georgia State professor and possibly Atlanta’s most prolific composer — every few weeks there seems to be another Demos premiere.His eight-minute “passing vanities…” is scored for the unlikely combination of clarinet, violin and deejay — the last of which Demos referred to as “the 21st century piano.”
First, Ted Gurch’s clarinet scurried to and fro, joined by Helen Hwaya Kim’s soaring violin. They scampered a while, evoking Stravinsky’s “Histoire du Soldat,” till DJ Little Jen (aka Jennifer Mitchell, a local club dejay and classical composer) slipped in, adding club-electronica rhythms and improvising on top of that. The best moments crashed “jungle” dance beats against fierce, agitated lines from the acoustic duo. It sounded like an ecstatic jam session, a constant delight.
So maybe the lasting virtue of Sonic Generator’s approach isn’t to reveal the art inherent in technology, but how technology gets us closer to that 19th century ideal known as “Gesamtkunstwerk” — a “total art work” utopia, both optimistic and frightening, for better and worse.
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By Eric Chasalow
April 9, 2008 11:04 AM | Link to this
“Weird synthetic gurgle sounds”
“…a bad trip set to music”
“gastro-intestinal noises”
Yes, this composer does read his reviews… but I do not usually bother to respond. While I do love having my carefully crafted electronic sounds dismissed as “gastro-intestinal noises”, I have to marvel (and despair) at Mr. Ruhe’s lack of awareness of anything of the history or context of electro-acoustic music. Leaving my own music aside (call it anything you wish please), composers work hard to create music and even less successful pieces deserve more respect than this. Colorful language and attempts to engage the reader make sense, but ignorant ego-trips of this sort do a disservice to the musicians, the reader, and even the critic. The only musical reference in this review is to the rhythm of a famous Stravinsky piece and some local DJ. The review alternates between notes on the critic’s vague feelings on a first hearing of pieces he seems to be unable to place in context, and comments on a few extramusical conceits drawn from the program notes.
Mr. Ruhe and I do agree on one thing though. The entire point of Sonic Generator’s work is that the technology is beside the point. Good pieces incorporate whatever technology they use to make convincing pieces. And by “technology” we might just as easily mean a very old machine, like a piano or a clarinet. In a good piece, the technology disappears. We are happily moving beyond a time when the use of electronics in concerts is considered a novelty.
Anyone who would like to actually listen is invited to go to:
http://www.ericchasalow.com/music.html http://artofthestates.org/cgi-bin/search.pl?sterm=chasalow&x=0&y=0
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